>>6055936You're looking at this at a wrong perspective. Movies can adapt a character, give it a name and a different personality and they can defend it as "it's a different generation/universe". Take Prowl of Animated for example. He's a motorcycle ninja compared to the cop car who looks like the Autobot insignia.
The problem you should be looking at isn't that they're not muh g1, it's that they don't do much to distinguish themselves as a character. Bay Roadbuster was an irish bot with a temper but he only had a few lines and no one would remember him save for "wait, was Crosshairs the green guy from the third?"
There's a charm to the aesthetic, and if they used the characters AS characters, people would be able to tell which scrap metal is Brawl and which one is Sideways.
